November 2000 Fraser Forum: BC’s Changing Immigration Patterns

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Gordon Gibson

The following is an excerpt with particular reference to aboriginal matters from a recent presentation by the author to the State of the Federation conference at Queen’s University on October 14-15, 2000. The overall presentation, titled "Affordable Resentment, Growing Options, Diverging Interests," surveyed the changing role of BC in the Canadian federation. A brief introduction and conclusion to the excerpt have been added. The full paper contains other comments on aboriginal issues as well.

British Columbia is the province with by far the most important outstanding aboriginal policy issues in Canada. The social and economic problems observed across the country also apply in BC, but there is a huge additional factor by reason of the lack of treaties covering most of the Indian population and most of the land mass of the province. What that means is that there is major uncertainty with respect to land and resource title—the fundamental of any provincial administration—and with respect to citizenship and form of governance ("Third Order," or not), which is the fundamental of any democratic society. The importance of these two questions cannot be overstated.

When considering the future of aboriginal policy trends in British Columbia, the courts will naturally serve an important role. However, as in any democratic society, at the end of the day, the views of the population will be determinative. No court can, for example, impose a particular treaty on the province, or order taxes to be raised for expenditures on Indians. (Or, to be a bit more cautious, no court has claimed such authority to date. It is dangerous to rule anything out where the Supreme Court of Canada is concerned, acting as the de facto maker of Indian law as a result of its interpretation of Section 35 of the constitutional amendments of 1982.)

The following excerpt deals with an important development in the demographic base, and therefore the politics, of the British Columbia electorate.

Excerpt

The population base of a society is the greatest single determinant of its political, social, and economic characteristics. However, normally trends in economics—globalization, technology, and so on—move more quickly than trends in demographics, and are therefore the more notable engines of change. Not so in the BC of recent decades.

Table 1 shows the populations of BC and Canada over the past 50 years. The astounding rate of growth—almost a quadrupling—of British Columbia’s population would surely affect its political, social, and economic characteristics even if there were no change in the composition of the population in terms of ethnic mix, source (i.e., local or immigrant), or aging. Sheer critical mass can change a society in important ways.¹

But that is not the whole story. While BC’s population has been showing similar aging trends to that of the rest of Canada, the ethnic and source indicators are dramatically different.

We are used to thinking of Canada as an "immigrant society," but for most of the country (outside of Toronto, where the immigrant effect is considerable, but less than in BC) giving any reality to this description really requires going back 100 years. Most Canadians, and their parents, have been here for quite a while.

Not so in BC. Immigrants (i.e., persons foreign-born and granted landed status) now make up over one-quarter of the population of the province.² This is matched only by Ontario. No other province comes close.

Our immigrant population growth rate between the Census data of 1991 and 1996 was 25 percent. (Ontario had a 15 percent growth rate over the same period.) Net international immigration is now the most important contributor to BC’s growth.

In addition, most of these immigrants are very new. Almost two-thirds of the immigrant population in 1996 had arrived in the previous 25 years. This is an astounding number.

Moreover, the composition of recent immigration is very different from traditional sources. As recently as 1968, 83 percent of immigrants to BC came from Europe (mostly), the United States, and Australia. Only 13 percent came from Asia.

By 1999, the figures had reversed, with the Europe/US/Australia figure being at 18 percent, and the Asian number growing to 76 percent. These "third reality" numbers also clearly constitute a revolution.

The net result by the time of the 1996 Census saw a huge change in the ethnic mix of the province. The situation is clouded by the questions asked by the census; people are able to give single or multiple ethnic origins,³ and can now include "Canadian" as one of these. The data indicate that it is largely the descendants of British stock who choose the new "Canadian" label, at least so far.

If one takes the "single-origin" data as a proxy for overall distribution of ethnicity, the British/Canadian/European cohort stood at about 68 percent of the total in 1996. The Asian group stood at about 26 percent. (Of these, the East Asian group, overwhelmingly Chinese, comprised 19 percentage points, and the South Asian group, overwhelmingly East Indian, made up the remaining 7 percentage points.)

Just 10 years before, the distribution was dramatically different, standing at 82 percent "European" as compared to 13 percent "Asian."⁴

All of this is obviously important, but what to make of it in political terms? No one really knows, but some comments and conjectures follow:

1. Evidence suggests that newcomers move only slowly into the political process. There is therefore a "lag" effect, but the activities of political parties in chasing ethnic votes gives empirical evidence of the growing importance of this group.
2. The ratio of Chinese to East Indian populations from the above figures is just a bit less than 3 to 1. Most of the Chinese immigration has come from Hong Kong, or latterly, Taiwan. Both of these areas are famously market-oriented economies. India, on the other hand, is a well-known centrally-planned political system (to the extent it can be said to be planned at all, in practice), with a very different political culture.
3. Voluntary immigrants (as distinct from refugees) by the very fact of their mobility are likely to be somewhat more adventurous and entrepreneurial than the average from their society of origin.
4. Immigrants, almost universally, consider that they are coming to Canada, not this or that province. The distinctions and divided loyalties between the two orders of government that most Canadians understand take some time to learn.
5. Immigrants, again almost universally, are not steeped in traditional Canadian attitudes towards such unique local questions as the British Crown, aboriginals, and other Canadian value sets stemming from our particular history. That would make a fascinating study on its own, but for the purposes of this essay and British Columbia politics, the important point is that immigrants do not share the collective Canadian guilt on the aboriginal issue. Indeed, many immigrants have come from places where their estate was worse.

At a guess, the "on balance" effect of the above over time is likely to be towards a gradually more conservative society in British Columbia. Moreover, notwithstanding the initial exclusive identification of immigrants with Canada rather than any single province, the primacy of provincial administrations in commercial and market matters as well as BC’s growing demographic difference from the rest of Canada may well mean that Asian immigrants will be at least as likely as native British Columbians to adopt a "BC first" attitude towards federal-provincial questions.

Conclusion

While generally very concerned about assisting with the social and economic conditions of aboriginal people, Canadians are already unsympathetic to the concept of a different sort of citizenship or race-based government. An Angus Reid poll done for the federal government in October, 1999, found that only "25 percent felt that aboriginal people have a historic right to self-government," while "40 percent think aboriginal people have no more right to self-government than other ethnic groups." This was a national sample. The BC feeling of opposition is almost certainly stronger, since in the same survey, the Nisga’a Treaty was well supported nationally, but opposed (and with growing momentum) in BC.⁵

In addition, a 1998 Angus Reid survey⁶ showed that 73 percent of Canadians believe that after treaties are signed, there should be the same rights for all. These sentiments are dramatically at odds with current government policy.

BC’s views are already significantly more egalitarian in this area than those of Canadians generally. When one also factors in the changing demographic base in BC, it seems quite likely that British Columbians’ views favouring equality of political rights throughout the population (i.e., with no governmental structures for aboriginals based on ethnicity) will harden further.

This is especially the case since many of the province’s new immigrants are Asian. New Asian immigrants from vigorous market economies are likely to be more conservative than other British Columbians, but even more importantly, they have two other perspectives of great importance. First, as newcomers, they lack any sense of historic guilt on the aboriginal file. Not only were they not here at the time of colonization and later when historic native grievances were generated; their ancestors weren’t either. Second, the social and economic circumstances of aboriginals in Canada today, difficult as they are, are in many cases better (and in terms of available governmental assistance, hugely better) than the economic and social circumstances from which some of the Asian immigrants came.

When one considers that the Asian component of British Columbia society is now about 26 percent, and that much of this cohort does not yet fully participate in the political process but quickly will, and that the Asian share of BC population continues to grow, there are clear implications for the politics of aboriginal issues in the province.

Notes

¹It is interesting to note that BC’s population today is 1,000,000 souls larger than that of the Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence.

²The following data is from publications of BC Stats, the statistics branch of the Ministry of Finance, based on census data.

³In 1996 in BC, about 56 percent of respondents gave single-origin answers.

⁴Aboriginal Canadians plus a few persons of miscellaneous origin make up the small difference to 100% in each case.

⁵It is notable that these results were not disclosed to Parliament for its consideration of the Treaty.

⁶See Darrell Bricker, "The Public Opinion Landscape," Beyond the Nass Valley, Fraser Institute, Vancouver, 2000, p. 469.

Gordon Gibson (gordong@fraserinstitute.ca) has an MBA from Harvard and is The Fraser Institute’s Senior Fellow in Canadian Studies. He has served in the Prime Minister’s Office under Pierre Trudeau and as both an MLA and as leader of the BC Liberal Party (1975-79).

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